Moving the needle on child literacy by making learning endless fun for kids and their carers.

Little Library - Children’s Experience

State Library of South Australia
2025-26

\ My Role Experience Design Lead (Creative Direction, Interaction Design, UX, UI)

\ Team Producer, Software Engineer, Technical Designer, Exhibition Designer, Graphic Designer

\ Tools Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Miro, Google Slides

\The Brief

Art Processors partnered with the State Library of South Australia (SLSA) to design a new children's library bringing SLSA and the City Libraries together into a single, contemporary children's library experience. Built for children aged 0 to 11, the space is designed to help young visitors grow a lifelong love of books, stories and learning, grounded in the Words Grow Minds research into early childhood development and its four pillars: read, talk, sing and play.

My role was to lead the experience design alongside the exhibition designer, shaping how visitors would use, navigate and interact with the space in line with the read, talk, sing and play model.

\ The Work

Discovery

Stakeholder engagement was complex from the outset, spanning two organisations with genuinely different priorities. SLSA was focused on a curated experience, while the City Libraries team was oriented around the functions of a traditional library: lending, returns and the like. Through interviews and workshops, we landed on a shared strategy, the space would lean into a curated experience rather than replicate traditional library functions, with SLSA leading the project as our primary stakeholder and the City Libraries team, who would staff the space once open, contributing input along the way.
Concept

My focus was translating the Words Grow Minds research into the visitor experience and tangible interactive moments. We shaped the space around four designated zones, one for each pillar. Read would remain simple: a space purely for reading. The other three pillars became opportunities for interaction. Through numerous creative ideation sessions, we explored numerous ambitious concepts but were constantly needing to remind ourselves of the target audience and the learning nature of this experience. The 0-11 y/o audience was tricky as the abilities and needs within this group varied widely and where necessary focussed some experiences on a subset of that age range.

Talk took the form of an artist-commissioned mural celebrating Adelaide, designed to spark conversation and storytelling. Sing became a dedicated room for kids of all ages to sing together. Play centred on a large interactive table built around a tactile, character-making game with a way to bring each creation to life digitally.

The client wanted something digital that would genuinely excite kids, but early on, we made the call to keep the space screen-free, informed by emerging research linking screen time to declining literacy rates.
Design

The design phase was experimentation-heavy and delivered a few genuine curveballs. Higher-than-expected build costs forced value-management decisions across the space. The most significant was descoping Sing from a fully interactive singing experience into a multipurpose media area featuring custom sing-along videos, no interactive technology required. Beyond the cost saving, this gave the client a flexible space usable for performances and presentations, with room to refresh the content down the line as budget allowed.

For the Sing media, I worked closely with the creators of the Kaurna Songbook, local Indigenous music producers, to adapt their existing songs into sing-along media pieces. It involved extensive prototyping and testing with kids, and was genuinely one of the most enjoyable parts of the project.

For Talk, I collaborated closely with artist Andrew Joyner, the mural's commissioned creator, on colour, composition and content through a staged process of numerous revisions.

Play, the project's major interactive moment, demanded the heaviest prototyping, working through what materials and mechanics would let visitors build faces with shapes. We tested magnets and paper before settling on custom 3D-printed blocks arranged on a grid. Digitising each physical creation into a digital character proved just as challenging: we ultimately trained a machine learning model to recognise the individual pieces and reconstruct each face digitally, a very rewarding challenge.
Delivery

The bulk of delivery challenges centred on the Play interactive. We worked with a local 3D printer to sample the collage pieces and grid templates, ensuring both durability and a high-quality finish. The machine learning model presented its own hurdle: it needed to correctly predict both the shape and colour of each piece in its correct grid position. While early results were solid, we found that roughly 0.05% of the time either the shape or colour would come through slightly off. Our software developer invested more time than expected retraining the model, and the results improved significantly.

\ The Outcome

The project is currently being installed on-site, with an opening planned for late August this year. It's already looking outstanding in the space.

\ The Learnings

Descoping Sing from a fully interactive singing experience to a media sing-along felt, at the time, like a compromise. In hindsight, it gave the client far greater flexibility and will future-proof the space in ways that ultimately strengthen the overall design of the experience.

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